Newegg has Western Digital Red Drives in Stock

Have you used the WD Red Drives?

Any thoughts?

Price just jumped to 159.99 for the 2 TB.

Hi,

I have not yet used the Reds. I searched on this forum and read everything I could find on the Reds. People spoke very highly of them. I read a bunch of posts on compatibility of the Reds with the Duo V1 and with the V2 and read the HCLs. Found one person here who said he has a Red working on a Duo but could not get any traction on anybody getting a definitive answer from Netgear. WD's website says the Reds are compatible with the Netgear Duo but they don't differentiate between the V1 and the V2. Thi scould be interpreted as a) the Reds work with both the V1 AND the V2 or 2) that WD only tested one model and then cast a wide net. Could not find out anything on which was correct. I believe it was Papabear that said a number of times that the Reds were scarce and sold out very quickly whenever any supplier got them.

So, I kept an eye on Newegg and some other sites. When the 2TB popped up for $119 with free shipping, I just decided to take a chance and try them in my Duo V1. The wors that can happen is they don't work. Not that I don't care about $240, but one can always use drives somewhere.

I will report back once I get them installed.

John.

Hey John,

Thanks for getting back to me.

I ordered the Reds as soon as I found out from you. I used to own the v1 but upgraded to v2. I think the HCLs lists the reds as compatible with the v2, but doesn't list it for the v1. Very odd.

I'll get back on this post when I get my drives as well!

Let's keep this going! :)

Hi fellow Duo V1 owners,

I have great news. Today, it was cold and rainy here on the East coast so I had some time to install my new WD 2TB Red drive in my Duo V1.

The Duo had one, smaller Seagate drive in it and was running RAIDiator V 4.1.6. So, the first thing I did was upgrade RAIDiator to V 4.1.10 which went off without a hitch.

Then, I powered it down. Removed the Seagate drive and installed one WD Red drive. Held the reset button until the 2 drive LEDs blinked 2 times to force a factory reset.

Fired up RAIDar, it prompted to click Setup, selected X-Raid and watched the Duo build the volume. It went pretty quickly, rebooted itself and was it was as happy as a lark. I renamed it, setup Alerts and wrote about 1 GB to it from Windows 7. It seems to be running just fine. Here is the SMART data:

Model: WDC WD20EFRX-68AX9N0
Serial: WD-WMC300xxxxxx
Firmware: 80.00A80

SMART Attribute:

Raw Read Error Rate 0
Spin Up Time 0
Start Stop Count 2
Reallocated Sector Count 0
Seek Error Rate 0
Power On Hours 4
Spin Retry Count 0
Calibration Retry Count 0
Power Cycle Count 2
Power-Off Retract Count 1
Load Cycle Count 0
Temperature Celsius 33 (= 91 degrees F)
Reallocated Event Count 0
Current Pending Sector 0
Offline Uncorrectable 0
UDMA CRC Error Count 0
Multi Zone Error Rate 0
ATA Error Count 0

Extended Attribute:

Hot-add events 0
Hot-remove events 0
Lp stat events 5
Power glitches 0
Hard disk resets 0
Retries 0
Repaired sectors 0

Later this week, I will hot add the second 2TB drive and let it sync. Hoping it will be rock solid.

Film at eleven, John.